Why didn't UFC 120 air live on Spike TV? Broadcast format to blame

With this past weekend’s UFC 120 event in London airing live in just about every corner of the globe, U.S. fans were forced to dodge spoilers prior to Spike TV’s tape-delayed broadcast of the overseas event.

Spoilers, though, were plentiful online (and on ESPN’s news ticker) in the hours prior to the broadcast.

So why didn’t Spike TV just air the show live?

MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) asked around and talked to sources close to Spike TV and the UFC. And the answer was usually the same: The nature of overseas shows just wouldn’t work for Spike TV’s traditional, commercially supported broadcast format.

Behind the scenes, overseas UFC events are treated like any other live pay-per-view broadcast. That means the time between fights can vary wildly, and assuring that all the needed commercials are included is nearly impossible. (This isn’t a problem with UFC Fight Night and The Ultimate Fighter Finale events since Spike TV can dictate the pacing of fights.)

So why not just scratch the commercials?

Simply, Spike TV couldn’t afford it. The UFC’s longtime cable partner pays a fee for the right to air a UFC event, and then officials recoup the expenses by selling the commercial time. And many advertisers are needed to stay out of the red since the price for a single entity to sponsor the entire show is beyond the spending limit of most companies.

Granted, some companies have sponsored a main-event or other high-profile fight on a Spike TV card. And because of that sponsorship, the cameras can stay in the cage between rounds (instead of cutting away for a couple of commercials.) However, it’d simply be too costly for a sponsor to fund an entire lineup in that manner, so the commercial breaks are needed to make sure each advertiser gets the time it was promised.

Additionally, Spike TV needs those four or five hours of delay time to set up and re-edit the night’s broadcast. They can cut up the live feed to make room to insert commercials and any other promos that will be included in the tape-delayed version. And many of those commitments aren’t flexible, so they have to stick to a predetermined schedule.

The downside, of course, is that the event doesn’t air live. But the upside to the cutting and pasting is that it creates available time for Spike TV to broadcast preliminary-card fights that didn’t air on the live broadcasts in places such as the U.K. and Canada. (For UFC 120, Spike TV viewers got to see Paul Sass vs. Mark Holst and Alexander Gustafsson vs. Cyrille Diabate, two preliminary-card fights that weren’t part of the live broadcasts, though a main-card fight of Claude Patrick vs. James Wilks was dropped from the delayed version.)

“Spike TV would love to air the (overseas) events live,” a source told MMAjunkie.com. “They’d like to air it live and run replays all day for fans.”

But again, the sticking point is that live-broadcast format, which makes it nearly impossible for a cable station as big as Spike TV to work in the advertiser commitments.

That’s why next month’s UFC 122 event in Germany will broadcast in a similar tape-delayed format, and that’s why the plan will remain the same for other future European and Asian shows.

So for the immediate future, U.S. fight fans will have to find a way to keep avoiding the spoilers.

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